What can I say...
Gotta admit that Dataman was better this time but for me it was actually the best week so far. Why so? Well, in my first week I was beaten by PuzzleScot 1-9 and in my 2nd week I beat afcwarren easily without any resistance. So, this 2-8 is actually my best score so far.

About the upcoming week...
I'm back in the relegation match but I'm actually quite excited as I have a new opponent once again and I'm quite optimistic as there are not many puzzles I haven't solved any more plus I really expect a good number of sudokus this week as we haven't had any for 2 weeks in a row now (which has been really annoying).
Obviously dickoon is still a favourite though.

EDIT: My solving percentage is nicely going up week by week and has now reached 93.3%, which is better than a couple of guys from here but probably it's not important for everyone. I for one defo wanna get back to 99%+ in the future...

PuzzleScot wrote:Well done Rodders. Very close all week, tied after the (delayed) tie-break, you win on total time. Couple of real stinkers in there week!
Late on in the rundweg solve, I realised I'd made a mistake somewhere early, so started again, and did the whole thing in well under 10 minutes - wish I'd abandoned and restarted earlier. Oh well...

Thanks Alan. I did the Buchstabensalat first yesterday as I thought that was my most likely point, so once I'd failed to beat you on that, I was feeling the pressure on the Arukone! One interesting scenario thrown up by the ladder earlier in the week was that I saw your time on the Pillen was in the top 20, so knew I needed a super-fast time to beat it and therefore probably took a chance or two which I wouldn't normally have taken, giving me (I think) my highest ever finish on a puzzle. In that respect, slightly unfortunate for you that you had gone first and set the time to beat (I must admit I don't always look at opponent's times but happened to spot that one as it was high up the daily leaderboard). Or maybe I need to be taking more chances in general to get better times ....

Appreciate you allowing the delayed tie-break. Look forward to our next encounter!

Well, this Scyscrapers was darn tough last night and took hours to solve and I had to use number of 50/50 situations to get there...but at least I stayed in the contest for the final day!

EDIT: Unfortunately got a Doppelstern / Double Star on the last day of the week and as I had never solved one before I was doomed. My actual Doppelstern's solving time wasn't as bad as it's shown though as I spent over 48 minutes of the recorded time on a Fillomino on another tab, so actual time would be ~21 min. But yea, Fillomino itself didn't go very well, so I wouldn't have had a chance even if the other puzzle would have suited me well or at least been familiar to me.
But 3 weeks without any sudokus -- WTH!!!

Congratulations to our winners! A week with a lot of puzzles towards the long end of the spectrum. It's rare that the "any solution beats no solution" stipulation comes into play and makes a difference (I've had a quick look through and I had to look as far as week 21) but it did on this occasion.

Errors and exceptions excepted. Byes are available; please give as much notice as possible. If anyone on the waiting list wants to drop out, that's fine. Feel free to concede a match, or all your future matches. New players are welcome (though after this week there will only be eight further weeks played in the ladder) and I shall change the length of the ladder if the waiting list reaches four or zero.

I've been relegated for 2nd time but at least I won't be out for more than 2 weeks...
This week was quite difficult with some ridiculously tough puzzles and sadly with no sudokus whatsoever. What are the chances that you don't get any in more than 3 weeks (last one on 20 June) ??? Don't seem very likely to me but that's how it's been And at the same time you get 2 and sometimes even 3 of some puzzles (e.g. I remember Camp) in one week sometimes but there are 3 different sudokus (so if you would get all of them 3 times a week you'd get 9) but you get none!

Well, one of the people with most puzzles solved at Croco-Puzzle is GiantPanda, who has solved 1235 puzzles, of which only 49 have been sudoku. This suggests a rate of just under 4%. In truth, I suspect that even that is a slight overestimate; at the moment, I don't have any reason to believe that the puzzles are not completely randomly selected, so the proprtion would be 1-in-35. This makes the chance of 30 puzzles in a row not being sudoku is about 42%.

There's a list of puzzle types sorted by descending order of popularity, and regular sudoku are reasonably close to the bottom of the list. You can cast your puzzle rating votes on the profile page.

OK, so the chances to get the regular sudoku are low but it's still more likely to get 1 in 3 weeks than not...
Also, GiantPanda has solved 138 sudokus considering all 3 variations, which means over 11% rate or 1/9. So the chances to get 1 of all sudokus should be considerably higher.

This list has number of puzzles that are not even on CrocoPuzzle (maybe they used to be?). Anyway, gave my 5s to 3 sudokus available but it's probably not gonna make much of a difference...

EDIT: LoL, where you talk about wolf... I'm happy that it finally came, pity that it came once I was out of the contest though This sudoku is kinda weird, never solved one like that (8x8 with 8 2x4 sections) before but my result seems good so far. Interestingly I am currently just behind this Giant Panda in the highscore table

EDIT 2: It seems that I will get my first top 100 result today but we'll see, still more than 7 hours to go

EDIT 3: Whew, finally! I have made it into top 100 indeed, 85. place is the result and my previous best 205. was broken into pieces I have beaten most of the guys from here and lost only to detuned, afcwarren & oenomel. Obviously also made my best single rating: 2013 That means I move up in all the relevant rating tables, especially in the sudoku one (rating 417) of course. And assessment for my overall rating is now as high as 197 but it'll probably come down again after I've solved some difficult puzzles...

Errors and exceptions excepted. Byes are available; please give as much notice as possible. If anyone on the waiting list wants to drop out, that's fine. Feel free to concede a match, or all your future matches. New players are welcome (though after this week there will only be seven further weeks played in the ladder) and I shall change the length of the ladder if the waiting list reaches four or zero.

Today made my best time in any puzzle -- 1:07 in Camp! Admittedly it was easy, probably the easiest puzzle I've solved on CrocoPuzzle so far, though.
Still would expect to be in top 100 (maybe) or 200 with a time like that but apparently I might even end up in 3rd hundred -- the level is darn high!

If you could add Dataman as well that would be great otherwise need to look for him like crazy

EDIT 2:
And a personal request as well. If you bother then could you also make one highlighting those users: allar, TiiT, umbluu, UrRa ?

Btw, could anyone tell mewhat exactly is needed to become a Kyu? I have just reached 100 rating points and according to the FAQ you become 20. Kyu at this level but apparently it's not that simple...
Oh, and assessment for my rating is now 218, so it's still getting better

If you look at the little rating graph that pops up when you click your name under the rating list, you'll see three lines.
The black line (higher than the others at the moment) is the one that has you over 100. It's the one that is most
susceptible to individual daily fluctuations and so on. The green line (currently at 26) is the 50-puzzle average. The
red line (currently at 6) is the 200 puzzle average. Those longer averages are low because they are averaging
in a bunch of zeros for puzzles you haven't actually solved.

Sadly, the Kyu ratings are given out for the red line. Which means that you have to realistically wait
until you've solved more puzzles for the Kyus to start accumulating.

Your red line will start going up a lot more quickly now as higher and higher figures are included in the average calculations.

The Personliche Statistik page tracks how long it has taken you to go from grade to grade. For instance, it took me 72 days between starting and reaching 20th kyu. I think you will be a little bit quicker than me, but probably not much quicker.

In theory, if you finished first in every rated puzzle, I believe you would take 31 days to go from zero to 20th kyu, by which time you would have a black line of 1218, a 50-average (green line) of 423 and a 200-average (red line) of 106. motris (Thomas Snyder, three-time World Sudoku Champion and five-time US Puzzle Champion, who has not seen around croco-puzzle for a few months, and whose rating can only be seen on the rating list if you include inactive solvers) took a little longer than that, but not much!

By the way, I believe the average only counts days on which you attempt at least one rated puzzle, so days off neither count for or against you, but do slow your progress down.

If you want a version with custom users you can use the linked page to generate you own. It should be fairly obvious how to edit the code as all you need to do it change the lists of names at the top and optionally the highlight colour later . If you have problems shout.

Thanks, just made 2 versions of it: one with those 4 custom users highlighted in green and another combo one with UK users highlighted in blue and those 4 highlighted in green
And yes, it was easy indeed but I was too lazy to check it out myself earlier

Sorry detuned, I wasn't at the races at all last week, and even forgot to do the puzzles on the Monday because I was engrossed in other things.

drsteve wrote:A bye request - I'll be off on Friday and possibly Thursday of next week so I'll need a bye for those. It might help that if a tie-break is necessary, we play that on Sunday if my opponent agrees.

PuzzlerNickG wrote:Sorry detuned, I wasn't at the races at all last week, and even forgot to do the puzzles on the Monday because I was engrossed in other things.

drsteve wrote:A bye request - I'll be off on Friday and possibly Thursday of next week so I'll need a bye for those. It might help that if a tie-break is necessary, we play that on Sunday if my opponent agrees.

Sunday tie-break is fine. I hope I get that far.

Well you did pretty darn well on that Hitori today. I believe the phrase is, Game On!

Btw, look at the bottom of today's Tapa highscore table, someone has apparently managed to make 100 mistakes solving it!!!
I have made 7 once but I wasn't quite sure how to solve the puzzle then, and I can't imagine how you make 100, really...unless you make mistakes intentionally but why would you do that

EDIT on Thursday night: Just solved my first ever Magnets and I gotta say I quite liked it (unlike Slalom and a couple of others). My time is nothing spectacular but beats quite a few puzzlers and I also didn't make any mistakes That means there are only 3 puzzle types left that I am yet to solve!
Sidenote on yesterday's Kropki...I just didn't see the order of the obvious 3-number combination for nearly 20 minutes I think, that's why ended up with a poor time like that, otherwise it was OK.

Well done Tom. I'm delighted though, at how close I became to being ladder champion - one blank slalom cell away from taking it to extra time!
<chuffed>I note that Tom is actually the only person who beat me over the 5 days!</chuffed>

Just gotta say that today's U-Bahn / Subway is a complete freak! Had to solve it 2 times last night to get it right and still had to use blue lines on 2nd occasion because there were multiple options. Unlike